it's ok

Friends who come over for a meal and help clean up afterwards are often surprised that we don’t compost.  I’ll buy my favorite whole milk raw milk yogurt in plastic, and sometimes I dilute some smelly toxic bleach stuff to clean the mold spots on the shower grout.

The 80/20 rule applies to me, and doing the best I can instead of being dogmatic and unwavering seems sensible. Composting is currently not convenient, and since we otherwise produce so little garbage, and recycle everything that can possibly be recycled, I won’t feel bad about throwing my produce waste into the trash can.  Plastics from the packaging process leach into peanut butter, so I make sure to buy tahini and nut butters in glass jars.  However, I’ll buy my favorite yogurt in plastic and avoid a lengthy trip to the farm for the single glass jar benefit.  Most of my cleaning gets done with vinegar and a few other inoffensive products.  But sometimes I need to bring in the strong and toxic stuff to get the job done properly. 

To make a long story short, compromising here and there, albeit with awareness, is ok.  No need to be a saint, no need to be dogmatic, no need to be a good girl or boy 100% of the time.  Just doing the best you can and giving yourself a break, with awareness, is ok. 

giving back, and then some

A system is considered sustainable when outputs are offset with at least as many inputs.  As a culture, we are entitled and used to taking.  In the long-term, however, that doesn’t work, not with people, who burn out, nor with nature, which deteriorates. 

Every year for the past three years we have planted hundreds of native conifers, deciduous trees, and shrubs we’ve obtained from the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation to restore the havoc the construction of our house caused.  We feel compelled to replenish and heal this little spot on earth that we are now stewards of. Trees and shrubs were removed where the driveway was cut in and the foundation was poured.  Wildlife habitat was disrupted and destroyed.  Now, however, free lay stone walls we built all around the property over the past years have created new habitats for lizards and snakes.  The new shrubs we planted everywhere are creating new places for birds to hide, and their roots ameliorate the poor clay soil as they expand underground to a wide web, while the flowers we add to the garden each year attract bees and other insects.  Each year we see more wildlife as we give back, make the soil better, add and diversify the plantings.

Healing means balancing by adding back what has been removed or is missing.  Elsewhere I wrote that you ask in German “Was fehlt Dir?” or “What do you lack?” when someone is sick or out of balance.  We knew what we took from the land and what was missing, and we are putting it back and then some.  Try this exercise with anything or anyone that’s out of balance.  Just ask “What’s missing?”  Then you can give back, and then some.

like an orchestra

When I recently listened to a classic orchestral piece on my car radio it struck me how the sound of so many different instruments melds into one, and how that one complex sound can only be achieved if all hundred or so musicians play together in total harmony, unison and synchronicity.  Take away the brass instruments, or ten violins, or a particular instrument that is crucial to one particular segment, and the whole is diminished.  One instrument on its own can never do what an orchestra does.  The whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts, and individual parts shine more brightly in the context of the composite whole.  

Through Suzanne Simard’s work with forest ecosystems for example we are beginning to realize that trees are less competitively Darwinian and individualistic, and exist within a mutually beneficial and cooperative mycorrhizal network of nutrient distribution from mother trees to seedlings rather than existing in isolation.  Take the big mother trees away and new seedlings suffer.

How is it that we humans have come to think of ourselves as distinct and separate, from one another and from nature?  Maybe the pandemic has brought to the forefront that we exist within a network of interdependence.  How dependent we are of postal workers, healthcare professionals, supermarket staff, bus and subway drivers, warehouse workers and delivery drivers to keep the whole running.  How dependent we are of our network of friends and family to keep us mentally sane, and how difficult isolation is.  We can accomplish so much more when we get together around common goals than if we go it alone.  We feel so much more grounded and settled, emotionally nurtured and embraced, in company.

Interdependence is not a sign of weakness but strengthens the whole and furthers a common cause exponentially.  Regardless, for example, of what your stance is on vaccines, the huge effort to bring a Corona vaccine to market within a year could only be accomplished through the work of a huge interdependent network of scientists and government efforts all working in unison towards a common goal.  Alone we are powerless at the enormity of the challenges of climate change.  But in the spring, when the earth stood still during the worldwide lockdown, we saw how fast pollution can be reversed.  

A whole orchestra can produce a gloriously complex, powerful, and magical listening experience in a way an individual violin simply cannot.

imagine!

Last year we began a new ritual in our Thanksgiving proceedings, taking turns reading the Native American Six Nations’, or Haudenosaunee, Thanksgiving address.  The address is an ode to the natural world that sustains us, and without which we literally would not and could not exist, a fact that often disappears under the layers of our material machinations and self-absorption.

Even though Thanksgiving is over, the message is more relevant than ever and will haunt us until we grasp the true underlying cause of climate change, our disconnection from the natural world. My social media stream was full of pronouncements of gratefulness over the past week, mostly for family, friends and the community at large.

But the bigger picture is even more important.  We need to respect, no revere, Nature again, the way indigenous people always have.  Because Nature has lost its sacredness in our mind it’s become a commodity we can exploit.  The soil that grows everything we eat, the air we breathe to sustain us, the water we consume, the sunshine that grows our plants and trees and warms our planet, are all so valuable and life givingly essential.  We’re literally dead without them.  Or when Nature deteriorates due to our doing, we become sick.  However, when Nature thrives in abundance and balance, we thrive in turn.  

Clean air and water, rich soil, enough rain, although not too much, enough sunshine, although not too much, and thoughtful and sustainable human activity make for a balanced ecosystem.  Let’s be grateful and reverend for our planet earth we are so intricately embedded in and not take it for granted.  Thankfulness must extend beyond Thanksgiving, and Nature must become sacred again in our minds in order to counter and reverse climate change.   Imagine, it all starts in the mind.

valuing our resources

Trash and waste, whether in the form of pollution or garbage, are leftovers in an open linear system, a system which is unsustainable in the long run and no longer viable.

When we honor and respect our resources and acknowledge that all raw materials ultimately come from the earth and are finite one way or the other, we become more vested in how we use them.  Shifting to sustainable and circular systems leaves less waste, preferably little or none at all (here an earlier post on zero waste).  This is where recycling with its Reduce-Reuse-Recycle tenet comes in, and the various ways in which we can apply those principles.

One of our most essential resources is water because the total water amount on earth is finite, while our population and water needs have grown exponentially.  In a linear system wastewater is considered waste.  But in a circular system it is reused after having been cleaned and purified.  Israel, a desert country, has put regulatory government mechanisms in place over the past 70 years that have made it water independent with surplus (!), and an agricultural force to contend with.  Israel’s agriculture shifted to water conserving drip irrigation, the country desalinates sea water for drinking, cleanse its wastewater for reuse in agriculture, puts a price tag on water by charging for its consumption, and swiftly detects and repairs over 90% of its water leaks to prevent waste, as described in Seth’s Siegel’s Let There Be Water.   Israel is a shining example and pioneer on how to value and manage resources responsibly, something all other countries must learn to do swiftly. 

On a related note, we are just starting to come around to managing better the trash from the stuff of our material culture (here an earlier related post).  This is how the Repair Café and Fixit Revolution, thoroughly researched and entertainingly narrated in Repair Revolution: How Fixers are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture, arose in the past two decades, a counter movement to the post war effort of ramping up production and consumption via built-in obsolescence.  Buying it cheap and throwing it away when it no longer works, and products such as single-use plastic bags and containers, have left us with enough trash to drown in.  Besides reducing, reusing, and recycling, we now need to add repairing to our Rs in becoming more conscientious and responsible consumers.  Repair that lamp, replace that zipper, bring the shoes to the cobbler.  Just fix it!

In our shift to a more sustainable culture with more sustainable consumption patterns let’s keep our beautiful planet earth in mind that provides us with everything we need to exist as long as we care for it.  Our earth is all we have.  We must nurture, not trash it, so it can be beautiful and healthy for us, so we can be beautiful and healthy.

on reconnecting with nature

Lots of Japanese beetles are happily frolicking on my roses this year, making a bit of a mess along the way, and some other pest, probably a moth caterpillar, has been laying eggs in our pussy willow and mauling its leaves.

Whether Climate Change, Covid-19, the garden pests, or so many other things – we tend to think that nature is out of balance.  But the more consequential conclusion is that we are out of sync with nature. We look to the outside for the culprit, a symptom based approach with little interest for the underlying cause.  Having become our planet’s biggest monoculture with the greatest impact on shaping the environment, the responsibility squarely falls on each one of us to make amends in rebalancing our relationship with it.  

Without a true understanding of the myriad elements that make up an ecosystem, each one of them contributing something that feeds back into the regenerative cycle, we tend to interfere in a reactionary way without being able to anticipate the consequences.  Used to the idea of getting rid of bugs with a spray can, we are learning the hard way that Monsanto has been making a worldwide mess of the environment and our health with their glyphosate that’s now showing up everywhere, including inside our bodies.

So, I won’t add insult to injury, and add more poison to a fragile planet that needs healing.  Maybe the bats that are living in our cliff can use this new food source of beetles and pests, or maybe the pests will promote the multiplication of the bats, which is a good thing. Whichever way around it is, nature is far wiser than I am, and I will leave it to the bats and birds to eat the excess bugs in my garden, instead of pulling out the spray.  A wonderful documentary about the 7-year rehabilitation of an abandoned farm into a sustainable and thriving orchard, The Biggest Little Farm, shows how intricate a balanced ecosystem truly is, how many elements contribute to a thriving environment, and that we can regenerate and rebuild by making an effort to reconnect with nature in a deeper way.  

hold on to your seat!

When people get murdered, or even discriminated against, because of their skin color;  when I have to think twice about a medical procedure, and more than ½ million people go bankrupt every year because they can’t pay their medical bills; when people work two or three jobs and still barely get by; when sick leave is not encouraged and sick meat workers go to work because they can’t afford not to; when education is discouraged by way of its astronomical cost, and the educational level of the country as a whole stays behind other developed countries; when pollution and deforestation are encouraged through profit oriented policies and we all get sicker;  then I cannot live deeply.  

This country is convulsing as we are experiencing the flip side and unravelling of a profit-above-all value system that no longer works for the majority of people,  and favors an ever slimmer percentage of the population.  The American Empire is crumbling because its values are rotten at the core. Racism, the cultural trauma this country is still carrying even after slavery has been long abolished, is still simmering under the surface and has broken out again, and again, and again, because it’s never been healed.  And so many other socio-cultural issues are broken as well.  

The tectonic shift I referenced in an earlier post is happening in real time.  We are experiencing an epic scream for awakening and change on all levels.  Inclusivity, togetherness, cooperation, trust, and sustainability are all values that are bigger than racism and social inequality.  Moving from Me to We is what we must do to resolve the biggest challenges in the history of humanity.  Leaving the myth of separation, as Charles Eisenstein calls it in his recent essay The Conspiracy Myth, behind, and uniting for a common cause, that of a better, more sustainable, life for all inhabitants of this earth, is a consciousness revolution, a shift in perception and thinking.  

When that shift happens for a critical mass among us, we will be able to tackle climate change, racism, hunger, and all the other challenges we brought upon ourselves because we believe we’re separate from each other and from nature. Revolutions are often messy because we fear the unknown and thus resist change. But the status quo is no longer acceptable, and neither is going back to whence we came, pre-corona, because we have already moved too far into the space in between. The best thing you can do is embrace the change and imagine a more beautiful new world (actually an Eisenstein book title).

a healing crisis - silver lining #9

In the last few days we’ve seen so many robins in our backyard that I actually looked up this red breasted bird’s symbolism.  

In homeopathy they speak of a healing crisis when symptoms briefly intensify before abating and disappearing.  I have been pondering if this worldwide crisis, a health pandemic with ensuing economic collapse we are all trudging through so painfully, is triggering a cultural healing crisis of sorts?  

Several symptoms of our cultural dysfunction have indeed intensified during this crisis, all of a socio-economic nature (see silver lining #5) because they are a result of our form of extreme capitalism, which is exploitative in nature, of people and of the environment.  At the same time, we have watched as nature has caught its breath and showed us how fast it can heal if extreme human activity is curtailed (see silver lining #2).  

Are we now able to see the connection between environmental deterioration and extreme capitalism? Are we now able to see the connection between a comprehensive social safety net and a robust economy?  

Lo and behold, the symbolism of the robin is “stimulation of new growth, renewal and hope.” 

environmental wake-up - silver lining #2

As a result of the world’s cessation of polluting activities in reaction to the Coronavirus pandemic, Beijing’s pollution levels have drastically dropped and the waters in Venice’s canals are markedly cleaner.  

Along those lines is a post from climate activist Greta Thunberg’s Facebook page about the unintended proof to ourselves that we, as inhabitants of one planet, are capable of coming together in a massive effort  when the motivation and will are there.  

from Greta Thunberg’s Facebook page

Could a shake-up out of our inertia towards climate change and all the other related environmental quagmires become an unintended but much needed side effect of the worldwide virus pandemic?   

moving mountains - silver lining #1

This is the first of several posts examining the silver lining underneath the worldwide Corona virus crisis, and there are many as you will see over the next posts.  

This virus, came out of nowhere - they call it a black swan event. in December it appeared in China and barely three months later it has engulfed the entire world. The public’s reaction, and the many governments’ actions, demonstrate what an enormous motivator fear is.  But the effects and repercussions demonstrate the enormity of what we can achieve when we all come together as a human species with one common goal.   

We have been paralyzed by the sheer size of the many problems our planet and species is currently experiencing. The specter of climate change with its innumerable subproblems has been around for how long??????????????   Somehow we have to be hit over the head by nature in order to spring into action.  Well, this virus clearly did that, and this crisis is showing us all how fast we can act when we come together as inhabitants of one planet with one common goal.  No mountain is too high, no crisis too complex.  

Let’s tackle climate change next.